Multiple death penalties
The Wenzhou Intermediate People’s Court in China’s Zhejiang province has sentenced 11 people to death over their alleged role in a $1.4bn illegal gambling scam operation in Myanmar.
At the Monday trial, the judicial body handed five other suspects death sentences suspended for two years.
murder, fraud, assault, and telecom fraud
According to the BBC, the court found multiple members of the Ming family mafia guilty of conducting criminal activities, including murder, fraud, assault, and telecom fraud.
Non-profit news firm China Perspective took to X with a video of suspects receiving the death sentence, which is commonly completed via lethal injection:
According to the court, the Ming family and other involved crime gangs had engaged in criminal activities, including illegal casinos, drug trafficking, prostitution, and telecommunications fraud, since 2015.
The Mings allegedly worked for one of the four clans that ran the Myanmar town of Laukkai in the Kokang Self-Administered Zone, near the Chinese border.
Merciless Mings
Myanmar extradited the suspects back to China to face trial after issuing warrants for their arrests in November 2023 on suspicion of murder, illegal detention, and fraud.
According to a court statement, the Ming family used “armed force” to set up and control multiple compounds within the SAZ. The syndicate allegedly killed 14 people, including ten who had tried to escape or disobeyed orders.
the Myanmar syndicate supposedly provided armed protection for multiple “financial backers”
The court’s report details an October 2023 incident in which Ming shooters opened fire on scam compound workers to try block their transfers back to China. Besides the compound crimes, the Myanmar syndicate supposedly provided armed protection for multiple “financial backers.”
Scam center crackdown
The court in Zhejiang sent a further 12 defendants to jail for between five and 24 years, with a total of 39 Ming mafia members sentenced for their alleged roles in the $1.4bn gambling and scam center operation. Other sources have previously estimated, however, that the Myanmar casinos connected to the crime families “were processing several billion dollars every year.”
The death sentences will no doubt ring alarm bells for other scam center operators, in particular the Chinese triads operating in other Southeast Asia SAZs.
A recent exclusive report by The Guardian suggested that similar centers along the Thailand-Myanmar border have “more than doubled” since 2021. A few days after the report, the US Treasury hit cyber scam operators in Myanmar and Cambodia with sanctions, claiming they’d stolen over $10bn from Americans.
While one crime family might be off the board in Myanmar, it seems another is just starting up, this time right on Australia’s border. According to a recent United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warning, East Timor is the new “scam center hotspot.”
